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Fred Hampton was another dynamic Black Panther leader who was assassinated, another tragic loss of someone with the potential to inspire millions. Growing up, Hampton was both a star athlete and a star student. While still in high school he joined the Civil Rights movement, joining the NAACP and leading a strike at his high school. He was a charismatic speaker and was recruited into the new Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party, quickly becoming its leader. He was a charismatic public speaker who could electrify a crowd. He also had a major talent for unifying people, trusted by both the old and the young, men and women, the poor and the middles class and people of every race. He tried to merge the Panthers with the P-Stone Rangers, a gang that had grown a conscience and begun social programs to aid the local community. Unfortunately this effort was sabotaged by COINTELPRO, which attempted to get the Rangers to turn on the Panthers by spreading rumors the Panthers were planning to assassinate the Rangers' leader Jeff Fort. Luckily Fort and Hampton figured out what was happening before a war erupted. Hampton was fearless during the negotiations, standing his ground despite the overwhelming firepower the Rangers had managed to amass and which was on as full display as Fort's dramatic way of explaining why the Rangers refused to be absorbed into the smaller Chicago Black Panther Party.
More successful were Hampton's efforts to bridge the racial divide in Chicago, in some ways even fiercer than that of the deep South, as Martin Luther King had discovered when he tried to hold a march in the nearby town of Cicero, Illinois, and was greeted by a violent mob worse then any in the South. Hampton created the Rainbow Coalition, which brought together poor Whites, Latinos, and Blacks in a demand for social change. With his ability to unite and inspire people, Hampton was a threat and he was brutally assassinated along with Mark Clark in a police raid instigated by the FBI. He was assassinated the night of December 4, 1969. The cowardly police even had an informant drug Hampton so that he lay helplessly asleep next to his 8-months pregnant girlfriend as they opened fire on the room where he slept, the informant William O'Neal having provided a complete floor plan. Hampton might have survived, but the police then shot him at point blank range to finish him off. The police then lied and claimed there had been a shootout, but the Panthers managed to expose this lie. All the bullets had come from the police. They led tours of the murder site and soon the transparent coverup had been completely exposed. Hampton was only 19 when they killed him - there was no telling what he could have accomplished. Tragically this is exactly why he was murdered. Today his son Fred Hampton, Jr., is trying to carry on the tradition of his father.
After 1953, the network was overseen by Allen W. Dulles, director of the CIA. By this time, Operation Mockingbird had a major influence over 25 newspapers and wire agencies. The usual methodology was placing reports developed from intelligence provided by the CIA to witting or unwitting reporters. Those reports would then be repeated or cited by the preceding reporters which in turn would then be cited throughout the media wire services.In 2008, the New York Times wrote:
The Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) was funded by siphoning off funds intended for the Marshall Plan [i.e. the rebuilding of Europe by the U.S. after WWII]. Some of this money was used to bribe journalists and publishers.
During the early years of the cold war, [prominent writers and artists, from Arthur Schlesinger Jr. to Jackson Pollock] were supported, sometimes lavishly, always secretly, by the C.I.A. as part of its propaganda war against the Soviet Union. It was perhaps the most successful use of "soft power" in American history.
The most common explanation for the collapse of the Soviet Union in the West is the malaise of the communist system with its unsustainable reliance on five year economic plans and big military spending."I find it hard to think of any event more strange and startling, and at first glance more inexplicable, than the sudden and total disintegration and disappearance from the international scene of the great power known successively as the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union."
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